For campaigners, a set of statistics published in August by the Gambling Commission, which regulates the British gambling industry, highlighted the urgency of the matter: Update on Assessment and Treatment. Research in the past two decades has dramatically improved neuroscientists' working model of how the brain changes as an addiction develops.

Would there be somewhere secure, indoors, that we can lock up our bikes? Great Trip to Las Vegas. Author Margaret Malamud notes the contrast between his "sober and pious figure" in the Olympic Lounge and the "statue of Nero and his lyre with which it is paired".